A blind guy with the name Wilbur should obviously get a guide horse named Mr. Ed. (and if you are too young to get the reference you are unknowingly suffering from cultural deprivation)
The woman, Ann Edie, was simply blind and out for an evening walk with Panda, her guide miniature horse.
There are no sidewalks in Edie’s neighborhood, so Panda led her along the street’s edge, maneuvering around drainage ditches, mailboxes and bags of raked leaves. At one point, Panda paused, waited for a car to pass, then veered into the road to avoid a group of children running toward them swinging glow sticks. She led Edie onto a lawn so she wouldn’t hit her head on the side mirror of a parked van, then to a traffic pole at a busy intersection, where she stopped and tapped her hoof. “Find the button,” Edie said. Panda raised her head inches from the pole so Edie could run her hand along Panda’s nose to find and press the “walk” signal button.
Edie isn’t the only blind person who uses a guide horse instead of a dog — there’s actually a Guide Horse Foundation that’s been around nearly a decade.
Go, Panda, go! This is a much better Panda than the South Park Sexual Harassment Panda.
Assorted animals are out there helping people in all sorts of real and questionable ways. This is leading to legal battles over rights of disabled people to use service animals to help them with their disabilities.
They’re all showing up in stores and in restaurants, which is perfectly legal because the Americans With Disabilities Act (A.D.A.) requires that service animals be allowed wherever their owners want to go.
Some people enjoy running into an occasional primate or farm animal while shopping. Many others don’t. This has resulted in a growing debate over how to handle these animals, as well as widespread suspicion that people are abusing the law to get special privileges for their pets. Increasingly, business owners, landlords and city officials are challenging the legitimacy of noncanine service animals and refusing to accommodate them. Animal owners are responding with lawsuits and complaints to the Department of Justice. This August, the Arizona Game and Fish Department ordered a woman to get rid of her chimpanzee, claiming that she brought it into the state illegally — she disputed this and sued for discrimination, arguing that it was a diabetes-assistance chimp trained to fetch sugar during hypoglycemic episodes.
Another case in the article involves a bipolar guy with psychotic and homicidal tendencies whose parrot calms him down. Read the description of him in the article. I wouldn't want him as a neighbor.
Sadie rides around town on Eggers’s back in a bright purple backpack specially designed to hold her cage. When he gets upset, she talks him down, saying: “It’s O.K., Jim. Calm down, Jim. You’re all right, Jim. I’m here, Jim.”
If a guy with homicidal tendencies (he admits to them) gets calmed down by a parrot then I say let him walk around with a parrot. I realize they can be noisy. A breeding pair of parrots got lose in Santa Barbara several years ago and as a result sometimes around dusk a dozen parrots nest in a tree near where I live and they chat up a big loud conversation. Definitely lends a more exotic jungle atmosphere to the area. But a parrot that calms down a neurologically messed up and dangerous guy is a parrot that is doing a good job.
The ability to classify pets as service animals has been abused and the article reports airplanes becoming modern day Noah's Arks. Well, so far I haven't had the luck to go on a flight that has chimps and parrots in passenger seats. How about you?
Looking into the future (a futures angle is a requirement here) one can see where all this leads: genetically engineered service animals. Granted, stem cell therapies, gene therapies, and tissue engineering will solve a lot of problems with blindness, severed spinal nerves, shriveled muscles, and deteriorated joints. So human disability should become much more rare. But I see a big future for animals genetically customized to serve important functions like "woof woof" to indicate you are about to hit people in a cross walk or that car that has braked ahead of you while you were engrossed in a cell phone conversation. Pets are going to need to pay attention for us as our gadgets become ever more alluring distractions.
Some might choose chimps as driving assistants. I figure with enough genetic enhancement that chimps could take over the actual task of driving. Then people will be able to text message in their cars without risking a ticket or charge of involuntary manslaughter for doing it.
But the genetically engineered service animals will eventually face stiff competition from artificial intelligences. Will the A.I.'s take over before pet genetic engineering hits full swing?
Update: Okay, I see that people outside of America are especially unlikely to know the legendary Mr. Ed. He's important because he dramatizes the future of horsedom.
Here's another excerpt.
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Rajo Devi, 70, had a baby girl, Naveen Lohan, weighing 3lb 4oz, by caesarean section on Nov 28. "Now," she said, "I want a boy."
Rajo and her husband Bala Ram, 72, who live on a farm in the tiny village of Badhu Patti in Haryana, India, are hoping controversial IVF doctor Anurag Bishnoi will help them have a son.
Within 30 years (and probably sooner) I predict stem cell therapies will rejuvenate reproductive organs well enough to allow most women to have babies in their 40s, 50s, and even beyond. Cell manipulation techniques with gene therapies will enable the creation of a woman's own egg rather than use donor eggs.
If a poor farmer in India can afford IVF treatment the prospects for world population control grow dimmer.
Her husband mortgaged all his crop of rice and bamboo for next year and took out high interest loans to pay for the £2,000 IVF treatment.
IVF pregnancy initiation rates continue to grow (note some of these pregnancies abort).
And the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society says the pregnancy rate for in vitro fertilization was 35 per cent in 2007, up nine percentage points since 1999, when the group first started collecting these statistics.
On the bright side, in the next 10 years we are going to find out which genetic alleles contribute to differences in intelligence. So at least some of the IVF babies of the future will be a lot smarter. We are going to need lots of smarts to solve some of the problems caused by overpopulation.
Not all the problems caused by overpopulation will get solved though. You might want to burn up some of the dwindling supplies of fossil fuels to go visit and see animals in the wild that'll go extinct in a few decades. Ecotourism ahead of extinctions and habitat loss is now the rage.
From the tropics to the ice fields, doom is big business. Quark Expeditions, a leader in arctic travel, doubled capacity for its 2008 season of trips to the northern and southernmost reaches of the planet. Travel agents report clients are increasingly requesting trips to see the melting glaciers of Patagonia, the threatened coral of the Great Barrier Reef, and the eroding atolls of the Maldives, Mr. Shapiro said.
The most notable long term pattern in human evolution has been humanity's growing capability to dominate all ecosystems. The rest of nature is not capable of restraining us and I do not expect we will restrain ourselves as our powers continue to grow.
Simple antioxidant pills for cancer risk reduction aren't looking like a good bet.
Women who took beta carotene or vitamin C or E or a combination of the supplements had a similar risk of cancer as women who did not take the supplements, according to data from a randomized controlled trial in the December 30 online issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
People who eat lots of fruits and vegetables get less cancer. But other people do not like to eat lots of fruits and vegetables. They'd rather chow down on a Big Mac, a Whopper, or maybe some Twinkies with a chocolate milk shake. Still, veggies and fruits really are the ticket.
Epidemiological studies have suggested that people whose diets are high in fruits and vegetables, and thus antioxidants, may have a lower risk of cancer. Results from randomized trials that address the issue, however, have been inconsistent and have rarely supported that observation.
The problem is knowing what in the foods cut cancer risks. Could be fiber. Could be non-vitamin antioxidants such as polyphenols. Could be minerals like magnesium. Or maybe the veggies with lower glycemic index just reduce the sugar surge after meals and therefore reduce the surge in insulin and other hormones that can stimulate cells to become cancerous. Probably the answer is multiple factors in fruits and vegetables mean it is hard to find a shortcut.
In the current study, Jennifer Lin, Ph.D., of the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, and colleagues tested the impact of antioxidant supplements on cancer incidence in a randomized controlled trial. A total of 7,627 women who were at high risk of cardiovascular disease were randomly assigned to take vitamin C, vitamin E, or beta-carotene.
With an average of 9.4 years of follow-up time, there was no statistically significant benefit from antioxidant use compared with placebo in terms of disease risk or mortality due to cancer. Overall, 624 women developed cancer and 176 died from cancer during the follow-up time. Compared with placebo, the relative risk of a new cancer diagnosis was 1.11 for women who took vitamin C, 0.93 for women who took vitamin E, and 1.00 for women who took beta carotene. None of these relative risks was statistically significantly different from 1.
Eat good food. Some day scientists will come up with a way to make The Six Dollar Burger and hot dogs as beneficial as cabbage, eggplant, and arugula. But that day hasn't come yet.
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A mere 12,900 years ago Clovis civilization in North America got brought down by an asteroid.
Abundant tiny particles of diamond dust exist in sediments dating to 12,900 years ago at six North American sites, adding strong evidence for Earth's impact with a rare swarm of carbon-and-water-rich comets or carbonaceous chondrites, reports a nine-member scientific team.
These nanodiamonds, which are produced under high-temperature, high-pressure conditions created by cosmic impacts and have been found in meteorites, are concentrated in similarly aged sediments at Murray Springs, Ariz., Bull Creek, Okla., Gainey, Mich., and Topper, S.C., as well as Lake Hind, Manitoba, and Chobot, Alberta, in Canada. Nanodiamonds can be produced on Earth, but only through high-explosive detonations or chemical vaporization.
Last year a 26-member team from 16 institutions proposed that a cosmic impact event, possibly by multiple airbursts of comets, set off a 1,300-year-long cold spell known as the Younger Dryas, fragmented the prehistoric Clovis culture and led to the extinction of a large range of animals, including mammoths, across North America. The team's paper was published in the Oct. 9, 2007, issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (News release on the 2007 paper is available at: http://tinyurl.com/82988t, with link to a copy of that paper.)
We really should develop a much bigger asteroid detection and tracking system and an asteroid defense system. Really, I'm serious. This is more important than the manned space program and more important than probes that go to other planets. Heck, there's even a scientific angle because knowing a lot more about asteroids will provide insights into the solar system's development and even identify asteroids useful for terraforming Mars.
Think processed foods are bad for you? Not sure why exactly? One possibility: inorganic phosphates in food might boost the growth of lung cancer.
New research in an animal model suggests that a diet high in inorganic phosphates, which are found in a variety of processed foods including meats, cheeses, beverages, and bakery products, might speed growth of lung cancer tumors and may even contribute to the development of those tumors in individuals predisposed to the disease.
The study also suggests that dietary regulation of inorganic phosphates may play an important role in lung cancer treatment. The research, using a mouse model, was conducted by Myung-Haing Cho, D.V.M., Ph.D., and his colleagues at Seoul National University, appears in the first issue for January of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, published by the American Thoracic Society.
"Our study indicates that increased intake of inorganic phosphates strongly stimulates lung cancer development in mice, and suggests that dietary regulation of inorganic phosphates may be critical for lung cancer treatment as well as prevention," said Dr. Cho.
Of course, if you are eating a diet high in vegetables and fruits and low in processed foods you do not need to know why exactly the processed foods are bad for you. Whether this study has identified a real reason to avoid processed foods or not we already know that drinking colas or other sodas isn't good for us and neither is eating processed cheese spread.
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We do not learn to associate emotions with contorting our faces in particular ways.
San Francisco State University Psychology Professor David Matsumoto compared the facial expressions of sighted and blind judo athletes at the 2004 Summer Olympics and Paralympic Games. More than 4,800 photographs were captured and analyzed, including images of athletes from 23 countries.
"The statistical correlation between the facial expressions of sighted and blind individuals was almost perfect," Matsumoto said. "This suggests something genetically resident within us is the source of facial expressions of emotion."
Matsumoto found that sighted and blind individuals manage their expressions of emotion in the same way according to social context. For example, because of the social nature of the Olympic medal ceremonies, 85 percent of silver medalists who lost their medal matches produced "social smiles" during the ceremony. Social smiles use only the mouth muscles whereas true smiles, known as Duchenne smiles, cause the eyes to twinkle and narrow and the cheeks to rise.
I expect we will eventually have imaging processing software that we can use when watching politicians and other figures on TV that would let us know things like when we are seeing social smiles versus Duchenne smiles. Automated emotional interpretation such as lie detection by facial expression reading
The high point in belief that environment is the source of all behavior was reached a long time ago with B.F. Skinner. I can't believe the guy was ever taken seriously.
NASHVILLE, Tenn.--For risk-takers and impulsive people, New Year's resolutions often include being more careful, spending more frugally and cutting back on dangerous behavior, such as drug use. But new research from Vanderbilt finds that these individuals--labeled as novelty seekers by psychologists--face an uphill battle in keeping their New Year's resolutions due to the way their brains process dopamine. The research reveals that novelty seekers have less of a particular type of dopamine receptor, which may lead them to seek out novel and exciting experiences--such as spending lavishly, taking risks and partying like there's no tomorrow.
The research was published Dec. 31, 2008, in the Journal of Neuroscience.
The neurotransmitter dopamine is produced by a select group of cells in the brain. These dopamine-producing cells have receptors called autoreceptors that help limit dopamine release when these cells are stimulated.
"We've found that the density of these dopamine autoreceptors is inversely related to an individual's interest in and desire for novel experiences," David Zald, associate professor of psychology and lead author of the study, said. "The fewer available dopamine autoreceptors an individual has, the less they are able to regulate how much dopamine is released when these cells are engaged. Because of this, novelty and other potentially rewarding experiences that normally induce dopamine release will produce greater dopamine release in these individuals."
The researchers used positron emission topography (PET) brain scans to help them reach this conclusion.
The researchers used positron emission topography to view the levels of dopamine receptors in 34 healthy humans who had taken a questionnaire that measured the novelty-seeking personality trait. The questionnaire measured things such as an individual's preference for and response to novelty, decision-making speed, a person's readiness to freely spend money, and the extent to which a person is spontaneous and unconstrained by rules and regulations. The higher the score, the more likely the person was to be a novelty seeker.
The researchers found that those that scored higher on the novelty-seeking scale had decreased dopamine autoreceptor availability compared to the subjects that scored lower.
If it becomes possible to use a drug to increase the number of dopamine autoreceptors will some thrill-seekers or perhaps some drug abusers opt to change their brain in such a fundamental way in order to gain greater ability to control and restrict their own actions? I can imagine compulsive spenders opting for such a treatment. But skiers, skydivers, and other thrill seekers might decide they'd rather continue to pursue extreme sports.
The Neanderthals were out-classed by the upstarts and just couldn't compete.
In a recently conducted study, a multidisciplinary French-American research team with expertise in archaeology, past climates, and ecology reported that Neanderthal extinction was principally a result of competition with Cro-Magnon populations, rather than the consequences of climate change.
The study, reported in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE on December 24, figures in the ongoing debate on the reasons behind the eventual disappearance of Neanderthal populations, which occupied Europe prior to the arrival of human populations like us around 40,000 years ago. Led by Dr William E. Banks, the authors, who belong to the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, l'Ecole Pratique d'Hautes Etudes, and the University of Kansas, reached their conclusion by reconstructing climatic conditions during this period and analyzing the distribution of archaeological sites associated with the last Neanderthals and the first modern human populations with an approach typically used to study the impact of climate change on biodiversity.
This method uses geographic locations of archaeological sites dated by radiocarbon, in conjunction with high-resolution simulations of past climates for specific periods, and employs an algorithm to analyze relationships between the two datasets to reconstruct potential areas occupied by each human population and to determine if and how climatic conditions played a role in shaping these areas. In other words, by integrating archaeological and paleoenvironmental datasets, this predictive method can reconstruct the regions that a past population could potentially have occupied. By repeating the modeling process hundreds of times and evaluating where the errors occur, this machine-learning algorithm is able to provide robust predictions of regions that could have been occupied by specific human cultures.
In a few weeks I'm going to review an exciting new book that, among other claims, argues humans benefited from an introgression (in flow) of Neanderthal genes that helped humans evolve more rapidly. So not only did our ancestors wipe out Neanderthals but humanity even gained genetically from the interaction.
Why didn't Neanderthals instead take some of our genes and out-compete early modern humans? Not sure. I can think of some possibilities. Even if the hybrids possessed some advantages they existed in small numbers. The beneficial genetic alleles humans gained from Neanderthal genes might not have become widespread until well after Neanderthal numbers had greatly dwindled. Humans might have had such large competitive advantages that Neanderthals couldn't absorb beneficial human genes fast enough to be able to compete. Also, maybe the hybrids were more often born in human communities than in Neanderthal communities. Or maybe humans were more accepting of raising hybrids.
Anyone have a clue on this?
Transfusions with fresher blood might improve outcomes of cancer surgery.
“New blood” can revitalize a company or a sports team. Recent research by Tel Aviv University finds that young blood does a body good as well, especially when it comes to fighting cancer.
The TAU researchers, led by Prof. Shamgar Ben-Eliyahu from the Department of Psychology’s Neuroimmunology Research Unit, discovered that a transfusion of “young” blood — blood which has been stored for less than 9 days — increased the odds of survival in animals challenged with two types of cancer. This finding, reported in the journal Anesthesiology, may solve an age-old mystery as to why some blood transfusions during cancer-related surgeries may lead to an increased recurrence of cancer and others do not.
“There is anecdotal evidence pointing to the fact that some surgeons really prefer to use younger blood units. They insist on it. Our research shows their reasoning might be sound,” says Prof. Ben-Eliyahu, explaining that the oldest blood in a blood bank usually sits on the shelf anywhere from 40 to 42 days before it expires.
Using an animal model, the researchers conducted tests on rats with leukemia and breast cancer. The odds of surviving the cancer, they found, were only compromised if the transfusion blood had been stored for nine or more days.
This result is not surprising. A group at Wake Forest University discovered that some mice have immune systems that are very effective against cancer and that group later discovered that rare people have extreme anti-cancer immune systems and that immune systems decline in their ability to attack cancer cells as we age. Blood that has not been stored as long probably is more capable for immune response.
I think the Wake Forest work demonstrates that not only should doctors use fresh blood with cancer patients but that they should use blood from younger donors and especially from donors which assays show to have especially effective immune responses against cancer.
The future development of immune system rejuvenation therapies will cut the incidence of cancer. Also, those rare people who have especially anti-cancer immune systems probably have genetic sequences for antibodies or perhaps for other parts of the immune system that make them fight cancer especially well. The eventual discovery of what makes their immune systems more effective will lead us toward the development of gene therapies or cell therapies to allow us to rev up our immune systems to protect against cancer.
Correct those flaws, and heating and cooling costs are typically cut by 20 percent to 30 percent, a saving of more than $1,000 annually in some households. In addition, carbon dioxide emissions and the strain on the national electric and gas systems are reduced.
About 140,000 houses will be weatherized with public help this year, a total that President-elect Barack Obama has promised to raise to one million, to reduce energy consumption and cut energy costs for households and taxpayers, who often absorb those costs for the poor. This would represent a historic shift in emphasis for the federal and state governments, reducing poor people’s energy bills instead of helping to pay them.
One can argue whether governments should subsidize home heating. But leave that aside. If a government is going to subsidize heating I'd rather in subsidize insulation rather than fuel supply. Insulation is far more cost effective. It reduces pollution, reduces waste, and cuts our dependence on dwindling supplies of imported oil.
I've made this argument in the past. A lot of leaky older houses are cheaper to seal up and insulate than to pay higher costs for heating for many years. What would help this process: more automated methods to measure heat leaks and detect their sources. Lots of contractors will quote assorted ways to improve a house's insulation. But uncertainty about how much such work will cut energy bills reduces the motive of home owners to upgrade their insulation.
Cell phones are already absorbing the functions of handheld games and MP3 music players and look set to replace laptop computers for many functions. Well, the idea of a separate handheld device for medical scanning turns out to be so 1960s. Cell phones will eventually scan blood and saliva.
Cell phones have already revolutionized the way people around the world communicate and do business. Thanks to advances being made at UCLA, they are about to do the same thing for medicine.
In the lab of UCLA electrical engineering professor Aydogan Ozcan, a prototype cell phone has been constructed that is capable of monitoring the condition of HIV and malaria patients, as well as testing water quality in undeveloped areas or disaster sites. The innovative imaging technology was invented by Ozcan, a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, and has been miniaturized by researchers in his lab to the point that it can fit in standard cell phones.
The imaging platform, known as LUCAS (Lensless Ultra-wide-field Cell monitoring Array platform based on Shadow imaging), has now been successfully installed in both a cell phone and a webcam. Both devices acquire an image in the same way, using a short wavelength blue light to illuminate a blood, saliva or other fluid sample. LUCAS captures an image of the microparticles in the solution using a sensor array.
So you will feel lousy, point your cell phone at your mouth as you stick out your tongue, and the cell phone will tell you what ails you. Beyond what is getting reported here I also expect eventually cell phones will either contain microfluidic devices (i.e. lab-on-a-chip) or will provide a UI into microfluidic devices. The cell phone will report the test results to an A.I. running on a server and will direct you to a local drug store to pick up a treatment.
Dr. McCoy won't even enter into it.
If you can just flick the right switch you can stop a heart from deteriorating.
Long-term gene therapy resulted in improved cardiac function and reversed deterioration of the heart in rats with heart failure, according to a recent study conducted by researchers at Thomas Jefferson University’s Center for Translational Medicine. The study was published online in Circulation.
The delivered gene inhibits another gene that has higher activity in diseased hearts.
The rats were treated with a gene that generates a peptide called βARKct, which was administered to hearts in combination with recombinant-adeno-associated virus serotype 6 (rAAV6). βARKct works by inhibiting the activation of G protein-coupled receptor kinase 2 (GRK2).
In order to do this experiment the scientists first needed to know that the kinase enzyme GRK2 is expressed more in failing hearts and that it contributes to the failure. Then they needed to know which gene to use to inhibit this kinase. Then they needed a delivery vehicle for getting this gene into the heart. A lot of work went into each of these pieces of the puzzle.
GRK2 is a kinase that is increased in heart failure myocardium. Enhanced GRK enzymatic activity contributes to the deterioration of the heart in heart failure, according to Walter J. Koch, Ph.D., the W.W. Smith Professor of Medicine and the director of the Center for Translational Medicine at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University. Dr. Koch’s research team carried out the study, which was led by Giuseppe Rengo, M.D., a post-doctoral fellow.
“The theory is that by inhibiting this kinase, the heart will recover partially due to reversal of the desensitization of the β-adrenergic receptors,” Dr. Koch said. “The expression of βARKct leads to a negative neurohormonal feedback that prevents the heart from continuing on the downward slope during heart failure. This was one novel finding of the study.”
Dr. Koch and his colleagues used five groups of rats in their study. Two groups received rAAV6 with the βARKct peptide, two groups received rAAV6 with green fluorescent protein (GFP), and the last group received a saline treatment. One of the βARKct groups and one of the GFP groups also received the beta blocker metoprolol concurrently.
Twelve weeks after receiving the treatment, the rats who received the βARKct had a significantly increased left ventricular ejection fraction. The treatment also reversed the left ventricular deterioration and normalized the neurohormonal status. Dr. Koch said that targeting the GRK2 enzyme with βARKct was sufficient to reverse heart failure even without concomitant metoprolol.
One of the ways that cheap DNA sequencing helps is that it leads to the identification of genes that contribute to heart disease risk. Those genes then become candidates to use in gene therapy to either turn them up or turn them down or modify how they work. The expanding knowledge about which genes get more or less expressed in disease tissue will help in the identification of potential targets for gene therapy. Though there's a lot more work involved beyond just identifying which genes are turned up or down in diseased tissue.
Gene therapy has been pretty slow in coming. The problem isn't just in identifying which gene(s) to deliver but also how to package them, how to get them into only the cell types you want to treat (turning on heart genes in the liver is not a good idea), and how to do all this without damaging the genome of the targeted cells. Cancer is a real threat and some gene therapy development efforts have failed due to cancer.
The experiment above suggests some good news. If we can find a way to deliver gene therapy safely into heart cells then at least some types of heart disease can be stopped and reversed.
I picture Jack Nicholson saying "you can't handle the truth" and Tom Cruise says "I got the genetic profile that says I can". Of course, maybe he doesn't. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has a big genetic component for vulnerability to it after a great shock.
Earthquakes have aftershocks — not just the geological kind but the mental kind as well. Just like veterans of war, earthquake survivors can experience post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety.
In 1988, a massive earthquake in Armenia killed 17,000 people and destroyed nearly half the town of Gumri. Now, in the first multigenerational study of its kind, UCLA researchers studying survivors of that catastrophe have discovered that vulnerability to PTSD, anxiety and depression runs in families.
Armen Goenjian, a research psychiatrist in the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, and colleagues studied 200 participants from 12 multigenerational families exposed to the earthquake. Participants suffered from varying degrees of the disorders. The researchers found that 41 percent of the variation of PTSD symptoms was due to genetic factors and that 61 percent of the variation of depressive symptoms and 66 percent of anxiety symptoms were attributable to genetics. Further, they found that a large proportion of the genetic liabilities for the disorders were shared.
The research appears in the December issue of the journal Psychiatric Genetics.
These genetic factors that contribute to PTSD will eventually be identified. I see this as a problematic turn of events for police departments, fire departments, militaries, and other organizations that put people in dangerous situations. People whose genetic profiles show they will get messed up permanently from getting into firefights are better off not getting into combat. Of course, combat poses other threats like getting one's leg or arm blown off that are going leave you seriously messed up or dead regardless of your genetic inheritance. But the total average cost of going into combat will be higher for people who have a genetic predisposition to get PTSD.
On the bright side, a discovery of which genes contribute to PTSD risk will help in the development of drugs that will prevent PTSD. That'll work better for combat troops than for people who get into natural disasters since the combat troops can start taking the protective drugs before they go into battle. Whereas many types of disasters like tornadoes and volcanic eruptions can come on too quickly for people to start using drugs in advance to prevent mental changes that'll permanently scar them.
The old adage that we can only learn how to do something by trying it ourselves may have to be revised in the light of recent discoveries in neuroscience. It turns out that humans, primates, some birds, and possibly other higher animals have mirror neurons that fire in the same pattern whether performing or just observing a task. These mirror neurons clearly play an important role in learning motor tasks involving hand eye coordination, and possibly also acquisition of language skills, as well as being required for social skills, but the exact processes involved are only just being discovered. In particular the relationship between mirror neural networks and social cognitive tasks has been unclear, and greater knowledge of it could shed light on problems such as autism that may arise when this process goes wrong.
It could be that some on the autistic spectrum (high functioning autistics and Aspergers) are able to do more original mental work because they spend less of their mental resources activating neurons to mirror what others are feeling and doing.
Mirror neurons fire not only when watching someone else perform a task but also when watching someone else experience an emotion.
Just as the same mirror neurons fire when observing and doing certain tasks, so other mirror neurons may be triggered both when experiencing a particularly emotion and when observing someone else with that emotion. At the ESF conference it emerged that mirror neurons involved in emotion resided in both the insula and cingulate cortexes, two regions of the brain known to play roles in emotions and feelings. However until recently the mechanisms of interaction between these two had been largely unknown. "In the case of emotions, we can say that there is a good deal of overlap between areas from the insula and cingulate cortexes," said Viale. "These areas become active both when individuals feel an emotion (e.g. disgust) and also when they watch someone else feeling that emotion."
Mirror neurons were discovered in the 1980s by an Italian group led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, which placed electrodes in the inferior frontal cortex of macaque monkeys' brains to study neurons dedicated to control of hand movement. This led to the surprising observation that some of the neurons responded in the same way when monkeys saw a person pick up a piece of food as when they were doing it themselves. This introduced the principle of the mirror neuron as a neuron capable of being triggered by imitation, as a mechanism both for learning and empathising in social situations.
While mirror neutrons cannot be observed directly in humans because electrodes cannot be inserted into their brains, the action has been inferred by imaging of the whole brain using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This showed patterns of brain activity consistent with the firing of motor neurons.
More recently motor neurons have also been discovered in birds.
Modest proposal: Rate a movie by having people watch it and measure their emotional responses with fMRI scanners. A movie that activates a lot of mirror neurons might be successful. However, the feeling of being disgusted or angry with the movie needs to be separated from feelings of empathy for characters in the movie.
What I wonder: do any psychopaths have a diminished ability to feel emotions that mirror the emotions that others feel? Could one detect psychopaths by showing test subjects tragic and painful pictures and then see if their mirror neurons get activated?
Also, could intelligence agencies discover moles by showing them images of enemy countries and their own country and see if they more mirror neuron activation for happiness or friendliness from enemy country ideological images and less from their own?
Burning coal at home was once commonplace, of course, but the practice had been declining for decades. Coal consumption for residential use hit a low of 258,000 tons in 2006 — then started to rise. It jumped 9 percent in 2007, according to the Energy Information Administration, and 10 percent more in the first eight months of 2008.
Online coal forums are buzzing with activity, as residential coal enthusiasts trade tips and advice for buying and tending to coal heaters. And manufacturers and dealers of coal-burning stoves say they have been deluged with orders — many placed when the price of heating oil jumped last summer — that they are struggling to fill.
In the United States wood burning stoves are more regulated than coal burning stoves for residential heating. That should change. Coal contains more toxins (e.g. mercury) than wood and so burning coal is worse than burning wood in residences. At least when coal is used in big electric power generation plants the expertise and capital are available to burn it very cleanly - if only the regulations were tough enough to require extremely clean coal burning for electric power generation.
Burning coal saves a lot of money for houses in colder areas. For people who are spending thousands of dollars per winter on heating oil the use of coal can cut out most of those costs.
Coals vary in quality, but on average, a ton of coal contains about as much potential heat as 146 gallons of heating oil or 20,000 cubic feet of natural gas, according to the Energy Information Administration. A ton of anthracite, a particularly high grade of coal, can cost as little as $120 near mines in Pennsylvania. The equivalent amount of heating oil would cost roughly $380, based on the most recent prices in the state — and over $470 using prices from December 2007. An equivalent amount of natural gas would cost about $480 at current prices.
Ground sink heat pumps, insulation upgrades, solar heating systems, and other cleaner alternatives are environmentally better than coal for heating. Anyone who is thinking about installing a coal heater ought to investigate alternatives. Coal is much less convenient. The need to empty out the ash on a daily basis and to shovel coal into feeders is also more laborious. Plus, coal requires constant residence in a house to prevent freezing up.
